When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hosts Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White and other Washington regulators at its Capital Markets Summit today, you’ll have to excuse our skepticism that it’s speaking to the concerns of any businesses other than those on Wall Street.

The Chamber’s claims to represent Main Street are misleading and inaccurate. At last year’s Capital Markets Summit, for example, the Chamber presented a survey called “How Main Street Businesses Use Financial Services” – but its polling of “Main Street businesses” explicitly excluded any businesses making less than $75 million per year in revenue. Meanwhile, the U.S. Small Business Administration defines a small business for many industries as making no more than $7 million to $35.5 million per year in revenue (sidebar—we feel even those numbers are too high, as no ”mom and pop” shop we know pulls in $7 million a year.)

In January 2013, the Chamber and two other business associations submitted a comment to the SEC opposing political spending disclosure. The new rule would make it impossible for public corporations that give money to the Chamber to remain hidden as they oppose policies widely supported by many of their shareholders and most Americans—on issues ranging from climate change to banking policy.

The Chamber vs. small banks on Dodd-Frank

At today’s event the Chamber will also likely oppose many of the still-uncompleted Dodd-Frank rules. Since the law’s passage, the Chamber has ranged from vehemently opposed to the bill to presenting “fixes” that would completely disable it. Meanwhile, many of the small businesses the Chamber purports to speak for have been more nuanced and supportive of the reforms. Groups like the Independent Community Bankers of America have said that Dodd-Frank, while complex and introducing new compliance costs, has done good things for them. If anything, they want further modifications in the law distinguishing them from big banks – not to be spoken for by those who are skewed toward Wall Street. The Main Street Alliance has testified in explicit support of Dodd-Frank, saying, “The efforts to repeal all or part of Dodd-Frank are doing more to create uncertain circumstances than any other factor related to the Act.”

And in what’s become a routine exercise in chutzpah, agents from the Chamber of Commerce show up at congressional hearings and in the media claiming the reform act stifles small business. Invariably, the Chamber’s agent claims to represent 3 million small businesses across the nation, even though more than half of its donations came from 64 donors. Invariably, they launch into examples only relevant to the mega-banks.

A case in point: On February 26, Chamber representative Tom Quaadman claimed that new Dodd-Frank restrictions on bank investments in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) would harm small businesses.

CLOs are packages of loan, and each loan in the package is likely to be for more than $20 million. As one of the Chamber’s own fact sheets explains, they are “portfolios” of “large commercial loans.” They are not standard small business loans for the corner grocery, and they are generally purchased by large banks. Of the $300 billion CLO market, banks hold $70 billion. Of this, the largest three banks hold about 70 percent.

Protecting bloated CEO pay

More evidence that the Chamber represents big banks rather than small ones is its longstanding defense of outsized, taxpayer-subsidized CEO compensation. Chamber speakers may reference a simple rule to require disclosure of CEO pay today. The rule would require companies to publish the ratio of the CEO’s pay to that of the median paid employee. On May 23, 2013, Chamber envoy Quaadman criticized this reform in congressional testimony. The rule only applies to firms traded on the stock market—hardly small companies. Quaadman nevertheless dared to cite a company that claimed it would cost $7.6 million to figure the ratio. The company isn’t named, possibly because of the embarrassment that it doesn’t know what its employees are paid, or can’t figure a median. Or more likely, the number is fabricated hyperbole.

Again, is the Chamber truly focused on small business concerns or on the protection of the wealthy elite? In a mom-and-pop shop, presumably mom and pop know what each other makes.

Wall Street crashed the economy where Main Street lives. If the Chamber truly represented Main Street, it would champion stronger rules to make Wall Street small and stable enough to avoid crashing the economy again.

This post was written by Sam Jewler, communications officer for Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch program, and Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

The government has taken action against yet another company, subsidiary or executive represented on the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or its Institute for Legal Reform for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). On Thursday, Alcoa World Alumina, a company controlled by Alcoa Inc., pleaded guilty in federal court to bribing officials in Bahrain to win a supply deal in violation of the FCPA, which bars U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials to gain a business advantage. Alcoa will pay a $161 million civil penalty, the third largest FCPA-related disgorgement ever.

Public Citizen’s November 2013 report “License to Bribe” documented the efforts made by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce since 2010 to weaken the FCPA. The Chamber has proposed five changes that are wolves in sheep’s clothing and would undermine the law. All of the proposed changes were rebuffed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which have joint jurisdiction to enforce the FCPA and released guidelines responsive to the U.S. Chamber’s requests to weaken the law.

One change the Chamber seeks is to limit a company’s liability for the acts of its subsidiaries. The DOJ and the SEC responded in a set of guidelines, saying that such a limitation would give companies an incentive to create subsidiaries for the purpose of engaging in bribery. Indeed, that is the mechanism through which many FCPA violations have taken place – including the Alcoa violations identified by the government.

The U.S. Chamber’s membership is a well-kept secret, but the organization’s efforts to weaken the FCPA seem to coincide with the behavior of a number of the companies represented on its board of directors. How much overseas bribery would the companies funding the U.S. Chamber commit if there were no law against it?

Additionally, why don’t those companies step out of the shadows and lobby openly against the FCPA, rather than hiding behind the U.S. Chamber? Would they still lobby against the FCPA if they didn’t have the cloak of anonymity afforded by the Chamber?

Alcoa’s subsidiary, Alcoa World Alumina, earned $446 million in gross profit on transactions facilitated by bribes between 2005 and 2009, according to the DOJ. The subsidiary will pay $223 million in fines and criminal penalties for violating the FCPA, while the parent company will pay a separate $161 million civil penalty for related SEC violations. According to the SEC, Alcoa’s subsidiary used an intermediary to funnel the illicit payments to Bahraini officials, and “Alcoa lacked sufficient internal controls to prevent and detect the bribes, which were improperly recorded in Alcoa’s books and records as legitimate commissions or sales to a distributor.”

The $384 million total settlement ranks fifth on the top 10 FCPA cases of all time; the civil penalty ranks third on the list of the biggest FCPA-related corporate disgorgements.

The Chamber’s record of trying to weaken the FCPA in ways that would legalize bribery, and its continued allocation of leadership positions to bad corporate actors, should cast a pall of ethical questionability over everything else it does.